I normally don’t post recipes that plenty of other people have covered – and probably better than I would anyway – but there doesn’t appear to be anybody who’s written about cooking the classic Sicilian dish, farsumagru, sous vide. Of course, it had occurred to me that perhaps there was a reason for this and I would find out why the hard way. Although, you can probably guess by now whether I was successful or not.

Aside from the usual benefits of not being able to overcook the meat, there are a few advantages to my method here. Typically, farsumagu consists of a large thin piece of beef or veal rolled and stuffed with layers of salumi (usually mortadella and prosciutto), beef or pork mince, peas, cheese and hard boiled eggs, which is then simmered in a red wine and tomato sauce. Because mince, for safety purposes, must be heated to a higher temperature than intact pieces of meat it is unavoidable that the outer layer will be overdone when cooked traditionally.

By using the water bath, though, I could pasteurise the whole roulade by holding it at a much lower temperature (57.5°C) for a few hours thus keeping the outer layer close to medium-rare. Another benefit was due to the thickness of the roll: it needed around ten hours to pasteurise (I erred on the side of caution using the Baldwin tables) meaning the beef flank I used, which can be quite tough even when grilled quickly, had some time to tenderise. Cooking conventionally I would have had to braise this cut and that’s not the texture you are looking for in a farsumagru.

Previously, whenever I’ve bought the meat for this I’ve always had the butcher butterfly it to give me a roughly rectangular shape but for a change I decided to do it myself. It’s actually quite easy as long as you have a sharp knife and I found a very good pictorial guide here. I accidently made a few holes in the flank when pounding it thin but I managed to patch them up with some trimmings I had accumulated.

Another good thing was I didn’t need to tie the roulade up with butcher’s twine because the vacuum packing meant the shape stayed intact throughout cooking. I also browned the roll beforehand because I didn’t want to subject such a thin layer to high heat straight out of the bath. There is a problem with doing that when using an edge vacuum sealer though because more meat juices get released as the air is being sucked out of the bag: it took me two goes to get a proper seal.

All that was left to do was make the sauce separately and this was just a very simple red wine and tomato reduction I fortified with the liquid from the vacuum bag at the end. I boiled the juices before I added them to coagulate any blood proteins before straining through a filter to remove the scum. It turned out the meat only released 110g of liquid over the entire time, which actually surprised me as I thought it would certainly be more: yet another benefit of low temperature cooking. And yes, I am aware how nerdy that last sentence makes me appear!